Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture

NOV 2010

ArtSeen

I was once the client of a small ad agency that was acquired by a global conglomerate. I remembered this while witnessing Matthew Barneys performance extravaganza, KHU, done in collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler, in Detroit on October 2.

ArtSeen

In his review of The Last Newspaper, Holland Cotter walked off with these lines: But a genuinely last newspaper is still nowhere in sight. And you read that here. Yeah, I thought as I read it, here on nytimes.com.

ArtSeen

In Breaking Through: Richard Bellamy and the Green Gallery, 1960  1965, author Erik La Prade synthesizes a rich and sometimes superfluous account of Richard Bellamy during the years of the Green Gallery's operation.

ArtSeen

ArtSeen

With the harmonies of Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys pouring out of every car radio, as a kid growing up in the West during the 60s, I didnt have to be reminded that California was where it was happening.

ArtSeen

Against the consistent attack of Mondrian and Picasso, Leider booms, Americans had only an art of half-truths, lacking all conviction. The best artists began to yield rather than kick against the pricks.

ArtSeen

Even without its notorious provenance, the painting that once hung over Hitlers mantelpieceDie Vier Elemente: Feuer, Wasser und Erde, Luft (The Four Elements: Fire, Water and Earth, Air) by Adolf Ziegler (1892  1959)looks malignant and bankrupt.

ArtSeen

Where is Photo-Realist painting today? Has it gone the way of other trends in marketing? Or has it simply been bypassed in the art historical chain of events? I would suggest that it has gone the way of both.

ArtSeen

Abandoning the diminishing returns of the touch of Abstract Expressionism (and, to be sure, it had run its course in his work of the 1950s), Roy Lichtenstein set out to achieve something much harder in both senses of the word.

ArtSeen

At the age of 15, Dieter Roths son Björn joined his father in his efforts to record a world of creation and wayward ideas in documents / diaries-cum-paintings. But, as Björn makes clear in this exhibit's accompanying catalogue, the elder artist couldnt shake a feeling of shame while producing his works.

ArtSeen

As the United States slid into financial disaster and unemployment unlike anything seen by most Americans in their lifetimes, photographic team James Tribble and Tracey Mancenido-Tribble retooled their skill set and became long-haul truckers.

ArtSeen

Freud defined the id as the personality component made up of unconscious psychic energy that works to satisfy basic urges, needs, and desires. Using traditional wheel-thrown and hand-built methods for her most recent executions in clay, Shechet taps into the psychoanalysts collective unconscious of archetypal symbols.

ArtSeen

In late 1950s Brazil, amid cultural, social, and economic upheaval, changes were registered by new forms of literature, music, and visual art. In visual art, Neoconcretismo combined geometry with sensuality and expressiveness, absorbing examples of the Bauhaus and European modernism.

ArtSeen

For those willing to venture to the end of New Yorks museum mile, El Museo del Barrio offers an education in local Hispanic cultural history with its groundbreaking exhibition, Nueva York: 1613  1945. To say this show is eye-opening would be an understatement.

ArtSeen

Poet David Rigsbee's The Red Tower: New and Selected Poems was just published this month by NewSouth Books, and his new collection, The Pilot House, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in December.

ArtSeen

The first solo show of Gordon Onslow Ford (1912  2003) in New York since 1946, which brings together major works made between 1939 and 51, is a landmark event that, among other things, further expands our understanding of what was happening in art during the 1940s.

ArtSeen

The World Trade Center was big. Well? It was. Growing up, everyone said that the twin towers were the tallest buildings in the worldeven taller than the Empire State Building, if not quite as nifty looking.